—Orion—

  I woke up to a sharp pricking in my hand, and almost instinctively swatted it with my other hand, having gotten enough bug bites to have the reaction drilled into me.

  I turned, and my body rolled so my hand could reach the offending feeling, and I almost slapped the irritated skin, but I realised something.

  Before I committed, I opened my eyes to see Sally poking at it. It was hard to decipher, but she seemed… impatient and eager. With a sigh of relief at having averted the disaster, I glanced at the campfire, the wood already reduced to dwindling embers. I doubt it would continue burning for much longer.

  I slowly got up, the drakeling growling and turning away from me as I went around collecting the scattered pieces of my clothing. Within a few minutes I was up and ready to go, and the growing hunger in my belly reminding me that it's—probably—been a day since I’ve eaten last.

  Before I could even take a step down the path, Sally was at my pant leg, impatiently waiting for a lift up to her favourite spot. At least she was transparent when it came to her wants, it was a nice change.

  I knelt and offered my shoulder to her, the drakeling immediately climbing past it and up onto my head again, the familiar pricking of her claws comforting at this point.

  With my gear reattached and Sally secured, I set off down the tunnel again. My mood was unusually good for waking up on a cave floor—maybe the company was just better than the last time I did?

  I let out a little chuckle at the idea, feeling a bit perplexed by the idea.

  But my laughing abruptly came to a stop when Sally’s head appeared right in front of my face, the little drake sticking her head right in front of mine, suspicion twisting her scaly features as she probably wondered what I was laughing about.

  I tried not to laugh again at her antics, knowing she’d probably stick her claws into me if I dared to laugh directly at her. I reached up with my hand and gently pushed her head back up and out of my vision. But her actions reminded me once again how alive she was, of how vibrant her personality was and the heights of her intelligence.

  It’s almost painful how much I like that fact. It makes me feel guilty, that she’ll likely become something akin to human, close enough that she’ll be a friend and someone I could talk to. But now she’s tied to me—without consent—forever.

  I did my best to put the thoughts of guilt out of my mind. It’s not like I can change how permanent the situation was anytime soon, but at least I couldn't see it getting any worse either.

  I kept moving down the tunnel, and after a few minutes, it began to flatten out again, flaring out into a larger and wider passage. With a few more steps it ended, the path’s walls and roof opening up into a massive space, big enough that it took a few seconds to process the sight.

  The cavern before me was enormous—a gigantic space where I could only barely see the ceiling. Most of it was a lake, maybe a swamp, but unlike those cradles of life, I felt certain that there wasn’t anything living in the dark, black-ish water before me, just floating scum and strange green clumps. It was similar to the water in the Deer-woman's pool, but more contaminants had replaced the feel and smell of rotting flesh that the cesspool had.

  The open air of the cave was dominated by the thick trunks of the stalagmites reaching up into the blackness above, leaving me unable to see through the mass of columns at distance. Right in front of us there was a roughly three-metre-wide stone path jutting out above the water, the unnatural stone line led into the darkness, the sea of stalagmites avoiding it, like they were shying away from it.

  The stone pillars that rose out of the water every few metres—now that I gave them a closer look—were actually cylindrical, an even thickness all the way up, rather than the cone shape that stalagmites had. More interestingly, they had grooves and markings etched into their lengths, identical in look to bark. They also had stone sticks branching out of their sides, completing the set of features that made them look like trees. Petrified, lifeless trees.

  A particular breed as well, incredibly similar to western red cedar trees. The towering thick trunks of both the living red cedars back on Earth, and the stone ones here could reach a height of fifty metres or more.

  It was indescribably strange to see them here, set in stone as… sculptures? Creations? They were too similar to their equivalents on earth for it to be a coincidence. It was almost like they’d been petrified, and then placed here as decorations.

  I gazed down at the path in front of me, the stone always staying ten centimetres above the waterline, and making a traversable path over the top of the lake. The path weaved between the trees, eventually splitting into more and more stone paths, becoming a spiderweb of possible routes through the stone forest.

  I took a deep breath and stepped onto the smooth stone, pausing for a moment to listen carefully, to hear if something was off with the environment. But there was nothing, just absolute smothering silence, my skin prickling with goosebumps at the realisation.

  In a cave as big as this, sound should travel fine—if anything, it’d travel further by echoing. How’d a cave with this much open space not have a single sound in it? No bugs chirping or clicking, no rustling or splashing of water. Not even dripping of water from above.

  Just absolute stillness. Nothing to hear but the blood rushing through my ears.

  I began to walk forwards cautiously, taking care to quieten my footfalls, my experience in stalking quickly becoming relevant.

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  It all reminded me of a time Father took me to a great forest of redwoods, I couldn’t see the tops of the trees that day due to the mist obscuring my vision. It was a surreal experience, the fog muffling sound and hiding everything beyond twenty metres away, the forest becoming a strange and mystical place, making me feel vulnerable and scared.

  Like there was something in the mist that I couldn’t see, but it was watching me.

  I continued to creep through the petrified stone forest, and even Sally was on her best behaviour, keeping as quiet as she could. She was clinging to my head tightly, the little drakeling as scared as I was.

  ‘Orion, if you can’t see it, that means that it can see you.’ A part of my brain reminded me, my Father’s words coming to the forefront of my mind, unbidden and unwelcome.

  Memories of training for this sort of scenario, of nights spent listening for a hunter, or trying to hunt it before it could reach me. I’d always assumed that it was for… animals, an overenthusiastic cougar, or mountain lion, but recently I’ve been realising their applications for people as well.

  I came to my first crossroad, the path forking into two options that would take me in opposite directions. Up until this point, the stone path had been unnaturally straight, but the two options forwards—and all of the ones that split off from them—curved and flowed seemingly at random, an aimless and meandering river. I mentally flipped a coin, and decided to take the left path. I observed the shape of the surroundings out of the corners of my vision, carefully watching for any movement.

  An interesting fact about human eyes is that they’re shaped in a way that makes it incredibly easy for another person to tell where you’re looking. It’s why humans have a white sclera that's so much bigger and obvious to observers. The white part of your eye makes the iris and pupil more distinct and allows people to easily estimate what you're looking at.

  A few months of my Father’s training was dedicated to looking at things without giving it away. Which now that I gave it a second thought, didn’t make any sense for animals. I had been tempted to ask at the time, but every time I wanted to know why I was doing things, especially the strange lessons that made no sense, he…

  A blurry movement out of the corner of my eye immediately stopped my idle thoughts, and I slowly moved my eyes towards the movement, the spot in question being a large clump of unidentifiable muck floating nearby.

  I watched it carefully until it ‘moved’ again, the material drifting against the pillar and crumbling apart, slowly and steadily stretching into two pieces of swampy… swamp gunk.

  With a silent sigh of relief I started moving again, and walked in silence for an unknowable amount of time.

  It was most likely a couple of hours before things began to change again—it was hard to know how much time had passed without the sun to rely on. The trees had started becoming sparser, with many of them broken, the remains scattered haphazardly. The trunks were sticking out of the water at random and the stumps they'd used to be connected to had been shattered, usually just below or on the waterline. Though the ‘cuts’ that separated them looked rough and abrasive, like they’d been smashed rather than sawed in half. It implied that they only could've been broken after petrification.

  Another possibility is that they crumbled under their own weight. Stone doesn’t tend to have the strength to support long pillars of material with similar density, when it does, it can only do vertical pillars. Like stalagmites.

  Either way, the unknown cause of their destruction made me want to take extra care moving forwards.

  In the distance I saw a mass of the felled trees, around fifty square metres of the lake was occupied by only stumps and their logs, thickly enough that you couldn’t see the water underneath. Not that it obscured the view below the water much more than the scum could.

  Above it was a mound of the stone pillars wedged and layered into a mound, somewhat similar to a beaver’s dam.

  After staring at it for a few seconds, I decided not to go towards it. I don’t know what could be in there, and I’d much rather leave this place without getting the ire of whatever could be lurking in there.

  I did my best to follow the stone paths going around it, but no matter where I looked, almost all of the paths converged to and around the mound, and buried by the debris. At least I could still skirt it by going over the broken trees.

  But as I started moving towards it, Sally suddenly tugged at my hair, directing my attention towards something to my right. I carefully flicked my eyes to the corner of my vision and saw Sally’s snout aimed towards something in the water.

  I looked down, and under the surface of the lake, I saw… something massive.

  The dirty water made it hard to discern, but what looked like a curved trunk was sitting just a metre below the surface. The—at least ten metres wide—trunk was winding back and forth until it dipped out of sight, but the part closest to us was the bottom, a thick and bulbous base. Its roots were also strangely angled, moving the wrong way, up and along the trunk instead of down and away.

  But what must’ve caught Sally’s attention was the gem lodged in the middle of the roots. It was an iridescent white, with fluorescent light emanating from it. It cast an eerie and ghostly light, strangely similar to an old faded neon bulb, reminding me of the lamps found in old concrete car-parks.

  It made me feel strange. Sick, and nauseous, divorced from my own mind in the worst way. Like someone had forced me to take drugs, making me dissociated and uncomfortable.

  Without realising it until it happened, I was taking a step towards it, the foot landing clumsily—dangerously loud.

  The sound echoed, loudly, audible enough that it broke me out of my stupor for a second. Immediately the urge to throw up strikes me in the stomach, nauseous enough that I spit my last meal onto the stone path without ever having the opportunity to stop myself.

  As I tried to grapple with what just happened to me, another sound—and not from me—echoed loudly.

  Beneath the water, the dead tree began to move. With more cracks and twitches, the bends of tree tensed into curves, and then twisted into coils.

  The roots and base of the petrified corpse rose, breaching the surface of the water with a jittery, jumpy motion. The scum flowed off of it, revealing the roots to actually be twisted antlers, cracked and yellowed with age, sitting on either side of this thing's head. The trunk becoming a long cylindrical body covered in brown scales as I finally got a clear view of it, and what I thought the base of the tree was now clearly a…

  A snake’s head, scarred on the left side with what looked like a blast mark over its eye, with small tendril, root-like scars running from the empty socket to all over its head. Its other eye opened, and revealed a yellowed sclera, a vertical black slit of a pupil sitting in the middle, with pus, mysterious white clumps, and a cloudy veil obscuring its view.

  It was a predator, of a size and power that could only exist in myths, and over-exaggerated tales told around a campfire. It wasn't something that I could've ever believed to be real, not until I watched the monster—easily longer than one hundred metres—rise up out of the water, towering two or three storeys into the air.

  It made me regret ever doubting Elio's words, that this place had monsters. He wasn't entirely right, not everything in this dungeon was one.

  Because that would diminish the word, to use it for anything except the monster in front of me.

  It didn’t even bother to blink as it slowly focused on me. It’s mouth sliding open as it let out a long and wispy wheeze.

  Then, the gem—still embedded in its forehead—grew brighter, the disgusting feeling immediately overwhelming me, my mind banished to a realm of feral nausea.

  And I could not think, or remember anything about what I’d just seen.

  Th-e li-gh-t de-st-ro-yed it al-l.